Heart of Birth

I came home from a birth early morning yesterday. Two hours from the first contraction to the last, its speed required me to be extraordinarily receptive to what was happening moment by moment. Timing was everything. The trust my client and I had in each other made it work. I had been with her for the births of her first two children and I truly knew her. I’ve been connected with hundreds of women in this way now. Invisible threads link us together in a fantastic web. Two nights ago, the thread with this client was taut and glistening; I had packed my bag, laid out clean clothes, done my yoga and gone to bed early. I was ready for her. Two hours later, her husband woke me. From my place to theirs, to the hospital parking lot, triage and finally the labour room, we moved with focus and calm. In a birth so fast, the intensity of what’s moving is immense and we had the strength to receive it.

Grace poured down. I did very little. My client didn’t need my touch or voice. We barely spoke. She already knew how to give birth. And yet she wanted me with her. So did her husband. Why? My feeling is that it was for the connection we have. She trusted it with her life. In the web of it, she was free. Real intimacy is generally absent in ordinary society and yet it’s essential for birthing and dying and any other time of healing. As a culture, we don’t understand this and so we set up barriers to it with the expectation that then we can’t hurt each other. In the “health care” system, the idea of “professional distance” only keeps us aloof from understanding and the compassion that comes from it. A similar situation exists in the yoga world. In flight from the authoritarian or manipulative guru, students still practice these same gurus’ techniques. Throwing away the relationship but keeping its dysfunctional container makes no sense. The abusive teacher is not a random accident but the product of the broken masculine paradigm s/he was created in. The paradigm is the root of the problem. Denial of life is in everyone’s background, so we all walk with wounds. Whether they bring us deeper into our humanity or send us further away from it, depends on our relationship with ourselves. When the feminine principle of receptivity is brought in, we have a complete container. Our integrity is guaranteed because we are whole.

Autonomy is the natural response to intimacy. At the most primal level of existence, this is true. Only after nine months in complete union with our mother, can we penetrate the world. Two nights ago, my client stood alone while we stood beside her. In her solitude, she did the most intimate thing possible.

A piece of fiction that is true. Everything was made in shades of green and blue. She stood and leaned against the wall or over a bed, hips circling. Hot blood dripped onto the cold floor, circles within circles. The head pressed deep. The nurse asked her to come onto the bed. She said I’m coming. Another nurse arrived and set up obstetric tools. The resident looked like a twelve year old, the husband said after. His wife’s lips part, wet hair revealed. No one but mother and child are ready. Panting mixes with primal sound. Do you still imagine giving birth is sexless? Smell the ocean here. A world is breaking. Breathe earth and iron. Stop now. Let yourself soften to this, wet and warm, burning open, rising up. And she slips free, a fish swimming in air, unaware that the elements are rearranging themselves. Hush. Who are you? Silence. Then the clang of metal on metal, breath on breath. And she penetrates.

“You Don’t Need to Meditate” is the title of a blog post J. Brown wrote last month. It’s a provocative premise to throw out into the yoga community and the comments on it reflected that. J. and I both have Mark Whitwell as a teacher. That doesn’t mean we have the same experience of Yoga but it does mean we share principles of practice and trust the experience that arises from their application. So I thought J.’s post would be a good place to jump off of to share my understanding.

Here’s what I know: meditation isn’t something that can be done; it’s something that happens when the conditions are right. Meditation is the gift/siddhi we get when we immerse our mind in the intelligence that moves our body and breath. Meditation is not to become “conscious” because consciousness is what we already are and is something that is impossible for the mind to contain. If we try never- the- less, consciousness’ free flow becomes restricted. This happens when we aim to witness our experience, constructing an “other” that we can then observe. However, when we move fully into our experience, the boundaries we set up between ourselves and the rest of the world become irrelevant in the face of our essential limitlessness. This unfettered energy that is our life is the creative power of the Feminine. When I gave birth, it became clear to me that there was no difference between me and what was moving through me, utter strength realized in utter openness. I was the receiver and the giver of life, both. All of us, male and female, woman and child, are this source and force. Trying to separate from ourselves in order to become “aware” is a brutal act of disintegration and our integrity is lost in the violence of it.

Mark says that it is not enlightenment that any of us really want but intimacy. Intimacy is enlightenment though, not in the heroic ideal of being outside of experience, but in the real meaning of being at one with everything, even with what is unloved, our fear and dread, our sense of unworthiness and our shame. Intimacy honours darkness and the wisdom found when words fail and even the idea of love loses its meaning. Still, intimacy remains. It is our natural state, what Yoga calls sahaj samadhi. We give birth in it; we are born in it and we die back into it. Intimacy is love divested of the mind’s parameters. This love is what Yoga practice is meant to offer us, not unending bliss but a heart that is whole. Pain is a “given”, necessary for our security and growth. Imagining that we can live apart from pain, and not cause harm in the process, is craziness and yet this idea is at the root of all transcendent philosophy, to which conventional yoga belongs. Recognition of the sacredness of our simple existence is essential to our sanity and the preservation of our humanity. Spirit isn’t absent from blood and bone and the fire that burns in the deep of the earth.

The challenge for all spiritual traditions now, including Yoga, is to let go of the dream of enlightenment and fully embrace our lives and each other. This means embracing the Feminine. I read yesterday here that for the first time in history Tibetan Buddhist nuns are being allowed to write exams that will grant them the title of “Geshe” and give them full access to the teaching monks have always received, which includes “ethics in their entirety”. As if ethical action can exist when we stand removed from others and deny their equal worth! I didn’t realize that the nuns have continued to be so overtly oppressed. They “have to obey the monks, can’t give them advice, and even the most senior nun still has to take a lower seat than the greenest rookie monk.” This is in a tradition that has at its root the knowledge that perfection is the nature of all things and that meditation is effortlessly present when we come into Yoga. That knowledge though, has been obscured in the misogyny of Tibetan culture.

A similar obscuration of wisdom took place in India. Krishnamacharya did what he could to restore the Feminine to its essential place in Yoga practice. Technically, he understood that it is in the union of polarities that life moves. But he didn’t realize the full implications of this, that love and its clarity is our natural state. His former student and lifelong friend, U.G. Krishnamurti, did and explained that Yoga practice is only useful, if it is an expression of our innate power. Krishnamacharya admitted to U.G. that he had no experience of what he had realized, a complete surrender of the mind to life. I think it’s vital that our idea of Yoga includes U.G.’s understanding, otherwise we are functioning within the limits of a hundred year old Brahmin’s worldview. He had a brilliant mind but it never let go its grip on him.

In the pervasive denial of the Feminine that still exists in Yoga, meditation as an escape from ourselves will hurt sooner or later. As the revelation of ourselves however, meditation is life, sex and spirit weaving us into the heart of the world. “Real silence is explosive”, said U.G..

My mother’s first memory of me was the sound of my voice. She said I screamed so loudly as I was carried away from her and down a hallway that a nurse remarked she had never heard a newborn cry with such strength. We need our mothers and our mothers need us. I was trying to make that clear but to no avail! In Toronto hospitals in the 1960’s, all babies were immediately separated from their mothers and kept in nurseries. Figuring out when to use my voice has been the focus of my life ever since. My writing is the result. Like my first howl, it comes from love.

To give birth is to be at the heart of life where the distinction between inner and outer dissolves and what was hidden comes to light. Unbounded, every cell pulses to the thrum of the world and a woman knows who she is because she is in touch with every part of herself. Yet fear of birth is everywhere, in our families, our popular culture and in the very “health care” systems we rely on. It shrouds our collective mind so that what is meant to bring us into wisdom, thrusts us instead into shame.

Women have shared their birth stories with me ever since I gave birth almost twenty-two years ago now and the crazy thing is that it’s the women who have had births that deepened and enlarged their sense of self who are usually the ones most hesitant to tell their stories in public. I know the feeling. After a woman has told of being induced, for example, and she describes the pain she felt from it and the relief the epidural gave her and the hours and hours she lay numb on her back and how she waited to be fully dilated as her blood pressure and contractions and her baby’s heart tones were constantly monitored and a catheter was inserted into her and she wasn’t allowed to eat and she was filled with I.V. fluid and then her baby went into distress and was born through a caesarean section, it feels like the wrong time to share how I went through none of that and felt the strongest and most beautiful I ever had after I gave birth.

Women’s stories of the suffering they have endured in birth need to be told and heard. It is vital to them and vital to us as a society. They are stories that demand healing and action! Along with these though, we need to hear of women’s joy. We need to share how our bodies can bring us into pleasure and strength and faith in ourselves and our world. I think these are actually the more dangerous stories. They challenge. They challenge our mothers and perhaps even our grandmothers. They challenge the idea that our bodies are a source of an inherent weakness. They challenge our collective idea of women. There is camaraderie in suffering. To declare that you live outside it is to stand alone.

Malala Yousafzai, the fourteen year old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban, is finding her voice again. The world watches. It was her strength that made her a target, not her victimhood. A spokesman for the Taliban explained that Malala’s writing was “obscene” and needed to be stopped. To claim that feminine intelligence is dirty has been the way of the patriarchy for thousands of years. The Taliban’s tactics are brutal, and proudly public, but the same impulse is expressed in more subtle but no less destructive ways in how birthing women are treated in much of the world. Most women either give birth without the medical safety net they need, or they suffer obstetrics’ assault. Either way, we are hurt. So are our babies. Some of us die. My midwife, Mary Sharpe, who is now the director of the midwifery education programme at Ryerson University, calls the situation a “global crisis”. She writes,

The incidence of medical and surgical interventions for birth is increasing at an alarming rate. In many settings, induction of labour and epidurals are the norm and caesarean birth rates range from 30% to 70% with a corresponding rise in maternal morbidity. In under-resourced areas of the world, equitable access to midwifery and obstetrical care is still not possible, and the United Nations’ Fifth Millennium Goal to reduce maternal mortality by three quarters has not yet reached its target…efforts to improve infant and maternal mortality by moving births to institutionalized settings are in fact replicating the worst in Western maternity care; women give birth in crowded facilities, are separated from their family and loved ones and birth alone in a dehumanized, assembly-line fashion.

This is taken fromJoyful Birth, a book I contributed to that was put together by Lisa Doran and Lisa Caron.

While much of the world looks in reverence to the United States’ high tech medical system, it is not serving birthing women well. The U.S. is one of four countries in the world where the maternal death rate is rising. Perhaps obscene is a good word for this. Ina May Gaskin, a world renowned American midwife and author, has created The Safe Motherhood Quilt Project to bring women’s unnecessary deaths into public awareness. She said in a television interview recently that, “We let so many maternal deaths go invisible in these United States and a half to two thirds of the maternal deaths that take place aren’t reported to the CDC. That’s very shocking because in most industrialized countries there’s a huge effort to identify every single death so that you can say, “OK, how do we reduce it next year?” According to the number of maternal deaths that have actually been documented, the U.S. ranks somewhere between 40th and 50th in the world. The highly medicalized approach to birth by American obstetricians is not working. Out of fear of life and the intimate human connections that are a natural part of it, medicine tries to control birth and many women feel safe in its tight hand. Salman Rushdie wrote, “Repression is a seamless garment” * Despite feminism and the sexual revolution, we wear our constriction so comfortably in the West, we barely notice it.

So my words are for you, to speak to the fear you can’t help but absorb and to feed the faith that is your birthright. We are the knowledge and strength we look for outside ourselves. Denial of life’s power, its unfathomable intelligence to bring us into being and sustain us, has been acted out on our bodies and minds, and those of our children, over many, many generations now. Unspeakable violence is our legacy and the impulse to heal it demands that words be found. A coherent story must be told, not just of the suffering, but of the rightness in embracing all that we are. All our lives depend on it.

You are your baby’s Source, its entire universe. This is obvious! And so what you eat literally shapes your baby, which isn’t a reason for guilt but for allowing yourself the pleasure of exercising your real power. In Pam England’s book, Birthing from Within, she writes, “Technology is not a substitute for good nutrition.” Ultrasounds and blood tests don’t heal or nourish. You do. By being in a close relationship with your self, it’s possible to really know what you and your baby need. Nourishing your self is the single most important thing you can do for your combined well-being.

Eating regularly keeps your blood sugar stable and your energy levels consistent. In the last few weeks before you give birth, you might need to eat frequent small meals as your stomach is compressed by your very full uterus. Your blood volume increases by fifty percent, so drinking frequently, about three litres of fluid a day, supports your body and prevents bladder infections, headaches and early contractions. Your need for protein increases too, so include it in every snack and meal, when you can. You will build strong, resilient tissue that will stretch rather than tear as you open to your baby. Nuts and dried fruit are a portable, high fibre snack rich in protein, iron, calcium and folic acid, nutrients particularly needed in pregnancy. Fresh fruit smoothies with yogourt or soy milk give a quick nutritious boost. For lunch and dinner, a source of protein, whole grains and dark leafy vegetables should be the priority.

Also, the average Canadian diet is lacking in adequate levels of DHA (docosahexaenoic acid), an omega-3 fatty acid found predominantly in fish oil that is necessary for your baby’s optimal neurological development and is also good for you, reducing your risk of premature labour and postpartum depression. Salmon, herring and sardines are a good source but a supplement ensures an adequate supply.

As a woman, you receive strong messages from our culture about how your body should look. Being pregnant is an opportunity not to take them seriously as you get in greater touch with how you feel. That’s where the wisdom lies. And the beauty.

What makes yoga Yoga? Here is an opportunity to get to the crux of the matter.

Learn the technology of breath and body that makes practice a movement into the heart of what you are: the nurturing force of life.

I’m one of a few teachers in Canada who is passing on this knowledge. It is a revolution in understanding that recognizes the essential power of the Feminine in everyone and everything and offers a way to live in wholeness and grace.

Yoga teachers and new practitioners alike will get what they need in a small group setting where individual needs are honoured.

Learn how to use a rebozo, a Guatemalan/Mexican shawl, to support a woman during labour. It’s like having another set of hands! The rebozo can be used in any birthing environment to relax the mother, ease her pain and help with the positioning of her baby. This will be an interactive workshop with plenty of time to practice techniques, ask questions and get an introduction to the skills and understanding of traditional midwifery.

Sunday, October 14th, 2012

10:00am to 3:00pm

Eka Yoga Centre, 473A Church Street, Toronto, ON M4Y 2C5

(south of Wellesley Street)

Fee: $75.00

Please bring a flat bed sheet to practice with!

Some beautiful woolen rebozos from Guatemala will be available for sale; they can also be ordered through Isabel.

Isabel Perez has helped women give birth over the last 33 years. She trained as a midwife with the renowned Ina May Gaskin, author of Spiritual Midwifery and recipient of ‘The Right Livelihood Award’ in 2011, known as the ‘Alternate Nobel Prize’. Isabel worked with Ina May for four years on The Farm in Tennessee before moving to Toronto, where she continued to practice midwifery for eleven years, until 1993. Since then, she has served women as a doula. Isabel grew up in Guatemala, where the seed of her spiritual understanding was planted by her great-grandmother, a Mayan midwife, and her father, a shaman. It flowers now in her birth work and teaching. For more of Isabel’s story: https://heartofbirth.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/isabel-perez-a-life-in-birth/

There is a ‘red thread’ of feminine knowledge that has been passed down person to person since ancient times. It leads to wisdom, a clear and compassionate understanding of life that grows out of an intimacy with experience rather than a separation from it. The following independent yet interconnected programmes give you an opportunity to become part of a lineage of teachers and healers who hold this thread, a way into love.

Heart of Birth Doula MentorshipMay 2012- January 2013

“Relationship moves the life force, nothing else.” Mark Whitwell

If you want to be of real help to a birthing woman, you need to come into relationship with her. Then life moves with grace. Early on, Ina May Gaskin, the now iconic midwife, recognized the crucial role a woman’s relationships play in how she gives birth. Our work together will be rooted in this knowledge and the programme begins and ends in your relationship to your self.

A personal practice of breathing, moving and sounding connects you to the power of what you are: the tangible source and force of life. This connection is Yoga and it offers a profound understanding of the Feminine and a complete container for working with birth and with your own ongoing life. All other paradigms can be integrated into it, including the medical.

“At first, do no harm!” is the ethical foundation of western medicine and yet the high caesarean rate in Toronto is evidence that women’s power is restricted and much harm is indeed being done. In learning how to nurture a woman’s strength to receive life and give birth, you are joining a group of gentle revolutionaries.

For her life’s work, Ina May received ‘The Right Livelihood Award’ this past year. It’s known as the “alternate Nobel Prize”. Mark Whitwell is a deeply respected “teacher of the teachers” who is restoring the Feminine to its necessary primacy in our contemporary understanding of Yoga and Life. They are leading the way for us.

Because the heart of birth work is realized in intimacy rather than ‘professional’ distance, the structure of our relationship will be a close one. A one-on-one relationship with me will be combined with group process and coming into working relationships with fellow doulas, clients and the larger community. You will be well supported in your autonomy!

The programme is nine months long; it has a depth to its structure and content that gives you a whole understanding of birth and your role in it. You will know how to be with another and how to be with yourself, fully alive.

You will become a certified Doula through ‘Heart of Birth’.

Fee: $2,700.00

Please contact me, crescence@heartofbirth.org, for a detailed description of the programme’s content and structure!

Birth CircleWinter 2012

Birth Circle is a once-a-month gathering of women who nurture the heart of birth, found in the strength to receive life. Birth Circle encompasses us all, mothers, maidens, doulas, midwives, teachers, healers…come join us!

Yoga, sound work and discussion nurture our strength. In enjoying our fundamental unity with each other, we can be of practical help to each other. Relationship moves the life force, nothing else.

Saturday February 25th, March 24th, April 28th from 3:00pm to 5:00pm at the Winchester Street Theatre, 80 Winchester Street, one block north of Carlton, one block east of Parliament.

Fee: $20.00; bring a friend and split the fee; students $15.00.

Heart of Yoga Prenatal Teacher Specialization

June – August 2012 (80 hours)

Offers an understanding of Yoga in the context of the regeneration of Life. Practice is the nurturing of a woman’s strength to receive Life in order to then give birth to it. The heart of Yoga is expressed in her: Mother, Source.

For yoga teachers and teachers in training. An 80 hour programme, which satisfies Yoga Alliance’s requirements to be designated a specialist in Prenatal Yoga.

Please contact me crescence@heartofbirth.org for more details!

Heart of Yoga Foundational Teacher Training

Beginning at the end of September 2012 (200 hours)

Please contact me crescence@heartofbirth.org for more details!

Crescence Krueger has been a part of Toronto‘s yoga and birthing communities over the last twenty-one years. Her direct experience of Yoga began when she gave birth to her daughter and realized that we are all the source and force of Life, what the ancients called Shakti. It has continued through nineteen years work as a Doula, helping other women give birth. Her ability to integrate the wisdom of traditional midwifery into current birthing environments has been supported by a twenty year connection to Isabel Perez and Ina May Gaskin. Crescence passes on the beautifully simple and effective Yoga technology she has received from Mark Whitwell. It restores the Feminine. She teaches and mentors yoga teachers and doulas and writes. Real relationship is at the heart of life and she is committed to working in a way that makes it possible.

In the wake of the disintegration of John Friend’s authority and empire, William Broad’s recent articles in the New York Times and Mark Singleton’s book a year or so ago, the question that everyone with even the mildest interest in yoga seems to be grappling with is, “What is yoga?” In the responses I’ve heard, the answer is absent.

Assumptions need to be put aside because without understanding what yoga is, attempts to practice and teach it won’t work and people will continue to get hurt. Whether they are in physical alignment or not, lying down or leaping through space, using props or just the bare floor, in heat or in cold, in an intimate group or a mass of hundreds, chanting Sanskrit or never letting a word of it pass their lips, studying ancient text or ignoring it, moving to music or in silence, working their edge or staying clear of it, eating vegan or raw or pure or whatever they feel like, paying fees or getting instruction for free, working with a teacher who socializes with students or stays aloof, who has thousands of hours of certified training or none, who is part of an ancient lineage or who gives no credence to the idea of spiritual authority, who has the anatomical training of a physiotherapist and the psychological insight of an analyst or who thinks only of light and love, none of this matters. What does is that you practice in a way that gives you the strength to receive… an inhale, a feeling, the movement of life. Its movement is yoga. Its movement is you.

This is obvious when you give birth. Then the vast intelligence of life pours through you in waves, bringing new life to light. Any distinction between you and what’s moving you dissolves. Coming into unity with your experience is the consequence of giving birth and it’s what yoga practice should give you too. Both activities return you to your natural state, sahaj samadhi, pure love.

In love, polarities merge. The polarities of spirit and sex and pleasure and pain are particularly fierce in a world that denies the inherent sacredness of life. Birth reveals it. We need to speak about the insight women’s experience gives us. It shatters dogma. What brings a person inside you is what brings them out: sex. The hormones that bring men and women to orgasm are the same hormones that control the birth process. While pain is part of birth, so is ecstasy. To give birth autonomously, you must leave your mental framework and enter the unbounded territory of primal experience. Then sexual energy moves, unconfined by cultural definition and the manipulation of self and other that comes with it. New life moves too and the sexual body and the spiritual body are known to be one. Every cell in blood, bone and brain vibrates in harmony with life’s descent. We are the source and the force of life, what yoga calls Shakti, so using yoga to make you somehow more spiritual is nonsensical.

Culturally, we are so very confused about love and sex. We set up huge obstacles to being in relationship and it starts at birth. The medical paradigm doesn’t understand how life works, only how to intervene when it doesn’t. In the face of drugs and surgery, mother and child lose touch with each other and their ability to be as one disintegrates. In a similar way, when yoga is misunderstood as a series of interventions that transform us into something else, something more beautiful, something more spiritual, they disassociate us from what we already are and become an assault on our integrity as life itself. We lose our selves.

It looks like we are beginning to recognize the violence and betrayal. But I don’t think the source of it is yet understood. Denial of life runs deep. It’s old and its craziness infiltrates every bit of us. Without a technical understanding of how to develop the strength to receive your life, any attempt to “do yoga” is not going to work. Adding beautiful words and concepts onto dysfunctional technology won’t help. It makes things worse, intensifying the sense of lack and longing that grows in the discrepancy between how things feel and how we imagine they should be.

Mark Whitwell has been an enormous help in my understanding of all this. What is missing in our collective understanding of yoga is a connection to life in all its beauty and pain. When UG Krishnamurti realized this, he called it his Calamity. It hurt to have his mind let go of its grip on his body, just like it hurts to give birth. UG insisted there’s no higher state to get to. We are yoga. Coming into love is heartbreaking. And the only sane thing we can do.

On her blog ‘Shivers up the Spine’, Priya Thomas writes about her interview with Mark Singleton, author of Yoga Body: the Origins of Modern Posture Practice. The interview was held before an audience (I was part of it) at the Yoga Festival Toronto a few weeks ago and was an exploration of how we are framing and re-framing yoga as it moves more deeply into world culture.

Yoga’s relationship with language is an intimate and long standing one. The Sri Yantra has the entire Sanskrit alphabet embedded in it. The first letter, ‘A’ , represents Shiva, the masculine principle. The last letter, ‘Ha’, arrived at simply by aspirating ‘A’, represents Shakti, the feminine. When ‘A’ and ‘Ha’ embrace, all of life is embraced too.

We can get physically tangled up in language though, bound tight by the cultural mind. Asana practiced as an imposition of mind over matter is the patriarchal legacy yoga culture is struggling with, whether it’s delivered in terms of spirituality, religion or exercise. In mind’s stranglehold, language loses its relevance. It no longer expresses our experience but controls it. Mark’s research documents the many permutations of mind’s imposition, present worldwide and through time.

An effective yoga practice untangles body from mind by digesting it. Words dissolve, vowels and consonants vibrate in our very cells and we speak the truth.